It's official. Over a third of my time here has passed. A
couple weeks brought the start of the second trimester. Two more semesters to
go until I find myself on a plane back home.
It's a bittersweet time though, because on one hand, I
simply cannot wait to wrap my arms around each and every member of my family
and friends, and on the other hand, I can't imagine not seeing my students
almost every day. Their smiling faces are the first thing that greet me when I
enter the school every morning, and the last thing I see when I leave each
night. They make a 13-hour workday seem like 2. They even make Friday's seem a
bit sad. A once celebrated day of the week now brings about a disappointment
that I have to wait two whole days to see them again. When I walk around town
on Saturday or Sunday I can't help but glance around the crowds, scanning each
face for a familiar alumna (student).
Though most of them live in aldeas (small towns/villages surrounding Guaimaca),
I get lucky every once in a while when I hear a, "¡Hola Christinita!" as I walk
across the street. And no, I didn't just spell my name wrong. After initial
awkward student-teacher barriers were broken, they began calling me
Christinita. I can't explain the why behind this too well, but basically in
Spanish you can add an "-ita" to the end of some words to make them
mean that word, except smaller. It's not that they think I'm small, but my name
happens to have a perfect flow to add an "-ita" to the end of it.
The love I have for these girls is equally reciprocated each
and every day. Each Monday morning I'm greeted with a hug and a kiss from
almost all of the girls at the school - not just my grades. When snack time
comes around, if I'm busy doing something and don't have time to grab a snack,
they'll bring one to me. When I go with them to mass at night, they take turns
holding my hand or linking arms with mine while we walk. By far the biggest
amount of love I was shown was on my birthday. We had been talking about
birthdays a couple weeks before mine, so I told them when mine was. I didn't
think they remembered, but about a week later one of them said, "May 9th
is next Wednesday, right?" I said, "Yes, why?" to which I got a
smile and a, "Because it's your birthday!" When I walked into the
school the morning of my birthday, I barely had time to put my bike away before
I got a bombardment of singing from the chiquitas, the youngest girls at the
school. A few minutes later when I walked into my segundo ciclo's classroom, I
was once again greeted to singing, hugging, and many letters and pictures expressing
their love and wishes that I am blessed with many more birthdays.
 |
| My math class on my birthday. |
My first
class of the day was a math class with tercero ciclo. I had planned on doing
practice problems with them, but when I walked in, they had decorated the board
so beautifully with birthday greetings (in Spanish AND English), and beautiful
pictures of cake and balloons. I didn't want to erase it so I wrote the
problems around their decorations. Later I had another class with tercero ciclo
but this time it was an English class. I had debated whether or not to put in a
movie in English with Spanish subtitles and call it an English class. I decided
in the end, however, that just because it's my birthday, doesn’t mean I should
sacrifice valuable learning time. That mindset went down the drain when I
walked into my class and found juice and cake waiting for me on my desk. What
do you do during class when you have cake and juice? You watch a movie, duh! It
was a fundamental rule all through my
grade school, and I didn't dare break it now during their grade school. We watched Monster-in-Law (in English with
Spanish subtitles) which was nostalgic because it was the same movie I saw with
my friends on my 16th birthday. I absolutely loved watching it again with my
students! I was telling my friend Keara this a couple days ago and she replied
with, "I thought we hated that movie when we saw it?" She's right. My
students, the juice, the cake and all the love they gave me on my birthday made
me forget what a horrible movie it actually is.
It's the mindset I've been having here recently, though. It
doesn’t matter how terrible something is, or how bad something may be going, my
students have an uncanny ability to make everything better. It's their love, their
innocence, their eagerness to learn and my eagerness to watch them grown that
has been making this year so special. I can't wait to see what all of them are
going to become, and I hope when I leave here, I leave them with a spark to
reach for their dreams. I want them to settle for nothing but the best, and I
want them to defy every Honduran statistic telling them they should stay at
home and have babies for the rest of their lives. I am so proud of them for every
accomplishment I have seen so far, and I know I will have so much more to be
proud of in the future.
When the students decorated the board for my birthday, one
of the messages they wrote was, "Thanks for being the best mom of our
class." I never realized being a mother would also fall under my job
description of being here.
